The study of well-annotated master games is the best way to improve. Acclaimed chess author Steve Giddins has assembled the most didactic examples from New In Chess. There are masterclasses by dozens of chess legends and no fewer than eight World Champions. Together they provide the high standard of instructional material that today’s club player needs.
Calculation is the engine of practical chess, and this is the first volume of a dedicated training series built to sharpen it. The focus here is the middlegame: the moments where seeing one move further, or spotting the move you would never normally consider, decides the game.
The book is organised as a graded course of themed exercises rather than a prose treatise. After a warm-up, the chapters each train a distinct skill — punishing poor piece coordination, finding the unexpected blow, holding up under pressure, landing a devastating attacking move, uncovering the quiet but killer positional move, and spotting the resource you missed. Later chapters push into evaluation and decision-making, where you must judge whether an opportunity is real and then choose correctly between competing candidates.
Working through the positions without moving the pieces — visualising to the end before committing — is the intended method, and the difficulty rises as you progress. A special closing section adds tougher, mixed material for players who want to be stretched.
This is a workout, not light reading. It rewards players who are willing to sit with a position and calculate hard, and is best suited to committed club players and above. Two further volumes extend the same training to endgames and beyond.
TACTICS TRAINER AVAILABLE!
This ebook is a part of Bundle: Chess Calculation Training
This book offers to meet the new challenges to Black by building an English Hedgehog formation. It is all the more convincing as it is based on the successful practical experience of one of the authors.
Kalinin helps players seeking the master title by showing how concrete knowledge leads to improved decisions at the board. He stresses the essence of the classics and the importance of human interaction in reaching analytical mastery.
After his 2008 book ‘Winning Chess Middlegames’, Grandmaster Ivan Sokolov takes us a step further into his dungeon of middlegame skills. In his well known style, Sokolov focuses on the different aspects of the complex middlegame.
Strategic Play - GM Preparation
Part of Jacob Aagaard’s award-winning Grandmaster Preparation series, this volume tackles what he considers the hardest area of all: strategic play, the handling of complex positions where the right path is not a matter of calculation or familiar patterns but of deep, original thinking.
This is the most demanding kind of chess training. The games and exercises here deliberately go beyond the skills drilled elsewhere in the series — beyond pattern recognition, calculation, and routine positional assessment — into positions so rich that you must genuinely think for yourself to find the way. Aagaard provides the conceptual tools and then sets you to work on tough, carefully chosen material.
As throughout the series, the emphasis is on active solving rather than passive reading: you wrestle with the positions the way a professional preparing for a tournament would, and the detailed solutions show how a strong player navigates the complexity.
Genuinely difficult, and aimed at strong, ambitious players — experts, masters, and aspiring masters — who want to develop the deepest layer of chess understanding. Not a first improvement book, but a superb one for those ready to be stretched.
This ebook is a part of Bundle: Grandmaster Preparation
Endgame Play - GM Preparation
Part of Jacob Aagaard’s award-winning Grandmaster Preparation series, this is endgame training pitched at the level where it actually decides games among strong players. It is not a theoretical manual of memorised positions but a workbook for building genuine endgame skill.
Aagaard introduces a small set of key endgame concepts and then puts the reader to work, with a large body of carefully chosen exercises drawn from recent tournament practice. The progression runs from pawn endings and simple minor-piece and rook endings through the notoriously tricky opposite-coloured bishops, challenging rook endings, queen endings, and on to tactical endings, fortresses, and strategic endgames — with a foreword by endgame authority Karsten Müller.
The emphasis throughout is on doing rather than reading: you train your calculation, technique, and judgement on real, difficult positions, the way a professional prepares. The exercises are genuinely hard, which is the point.
Best suited to strong club players, experts, and aspiring masters who want to turn endgame knowledge into practical strength. Demanding, rigorous, and highly rewarding for the committed improver.
In Calculation thinking methods such as Candidates, Combinations, Prophylaxis, Comparison, Elimination, Intermediate Moves, Imagination and Traps are explained to the reader, and ownership of them is offered through a carefully selected series of exercises.
Attack & Defense - GM Preparation
Part of Jacob Aagaard’s award-winning Grandmaster Preparation series, this volume tackles the dynamic heart of the game: the twin skills of attacking and defending. These are the moments when a game is won or lost outright, and they are notoriously hard to teach as a system rather than a set of disconnected examples.
Aagaard’s solution is to carve dynamic play into separate, trainable abilities — seizing and using the initiative, attacking the king, defending under pressure, and finding counterplay — and to set out the main principles governing each. By breaking the subject into clear components, he gives the reader a structured way to expand a part of chess that most players approach by instinct alone.
As throughout the series, the method is active rather than passive: the principles are introduced and then drilled through a large body of demanding exercises drawn from real play, so you build the skill by solving rather than just reading. The detailed solutions show how a strong player reasons through the chaos of a sharp position.
This is genuinely difficult, high-level material, best suited to strong club players, experts, and aspiring masters who want to sharpen the attacking and defensive sides of their game. A rigorous workout, and a natural companion to the other volumes in the series.
This book presents a full repertoire against open Sicilians with 1.e4 c5 2.Nf3 e6. It advocates the modern set-up with Bc1-e3 and Qd1-f3 against the Taimanov, an innovative treatment of the Keres Attack, 5.c4 against the Kan.
The book contains 50 of the most stunning games of 2016. These games from high-level tournaments have been selected and analyzed by Grandmasters Naiditsch, Balogh, and Maze.
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